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I think you should read the transcript (or watch the video) of Loic Le Meur explaining why he’s redirecting Seesmic because it’s a good example of how entrepreneurs find think through the adjustments they make to their businesses.

Why I’m posting it on Mixergy

This is a good example of something we keep seeing in Mixergy programs: entrepreneurs redirect their companies several times before hitting on the big idea. Some examples:

– Alexis Ohanion told us that he had a vision that combined food and mobile phones before Y Combinator opened his eyes to what became Reddit. (Watch)

– Roy Rubin told us his business goal was just to earn money in school, and then he discovered ecommerce. (Watch)

– I started out in email newsletters before discovering online greeting cards. (Watch)

How Seesmic is changing

Seesmic, which I’ve used for video. Loic is more honest that most entrepreneurs about why he’s making the change. Basically, video is a tough business, and unless you’re YouTube, there’s not much growth. Meanwhile his side project — a desktop application that combines people’s social network activity — is generating excitement. So he’s focusing on that.

Here’s the video of Loic Explaining the change

I had it transcribed. Thought You might prefer to read it.

[I bolded sections I think you should notice.]

Hallo, Chrissy. Thanks for your kind words.

It’s four a.m. here so I’m a bit slow. I’m sorry. I thank you for all your love for Seesmic. I also love Seesmic. Well, it’s up, right? It’s on video.Seesmic.com.

And yes, our main focus is now to build this tool that makes your community together in an easier way using the main social software and not only video. So that is twitter plus Facebook right now. And video conversation will reappear and be a good citizen that position soon.

But we’re not getting any growth on the video conversation site, as you know. As many have seen for the last months. And so it’s just me here as an entrepreneur just trying to find growth and something that people use.

And now each time I go somewhere I meet users of Seesmic Desktop who are very happy, giving me suggestions. And I love video still. I’m still doing lots of video. But context has really changed in the last year, year and a half. And I need to make Seesmic, the company, survive.

So, as you can see, the site is here. It will give room. The reason why we moved here on video.Seesmic.com is that it gives room to a new Seesmic site which will be basically like Seesmic desktop but web-based. And will have video but not at the beginning. And we get a lot of demand requests for that. And I will do my best to have a video conversation and keep it up.

As you can see, this is a lot of effort, actually, to move it to video.Seesmic.com and keep it up, despite the fact that it’s not growing as we all thought. So you can see I’m loyal to it and we will find a good way to reintegrate it into the new positioning of Seesmic. But I understand you like it. I love video conversation too. But it’s simply not taking off.

I think it’s not technology problem, even though I know many people here blame me for the quality of the technology. I think it’s a human problem. There are very few people like you and me and you can see there is no video site, really, apart from You Tube, that really grows these days. Like 12 seconds, tech, tweet video, all thee tweet video sites around twitter. They’re all flat, if they’re growing at all.

And I have lots of respect for them, as much as I have lots of respect for our community. And Seesmic is up. Video conversation is up. We’re keeping all of those technology assets, keeping it up. And we will integrate video a lot in the new site. But I think that where we’re going to have growth, instead of recreating our own social software, which is what we’ve been doing, we’re going to better integrate in others. And not only with video.

Just because video is too narrow. Very few people do it the way you do. But I agree. I love it. The quality of friendship that were created by the site are just amazing. Just very few people do it. And so if I keep focusing only on that it’s a sure path to failure.

So it’s up and we’re focusing a lot on something wider, keeping it here, and when it’s going to grow. Because I think it’s going to grow, frankly in a few years at least. I think. We’ll be there when it grows. We’ve all our assets and video integrate into a much better way.

In the meantime, I hope you all can help us, if you’re interested, build the community building, Seesmic, which is the third one which is coming on July 10th.

And you can still use the video site. It’s all here and available. Thanks.

And yeah, I will communicate more. What happened is the team pushed it as I wasn’t planning and it’s all my fault. Because I got confused on the time differences so I wanted to post a short video.

But that’s I mean…honestly, I didn’t take anything down. It’s all up and it’s all available. So I don’t think I did anything wrong than posting a short video. Yeah, a short video telling you that we’re moving to video at Seesmic dot com could have helped. I agree with that. But it’s all there.

12Seconds had something to say about the video. Their growth isn't flat. Here's what they had to say about it:

“2. Our growth is not flat. We launched a year ago and we’ve had great growth. People like using 12seconds and we’re going to keep building our community. We’re pretty content. Social video isn’t easy but it’s worth it.”

http://mixergy.com AndrewWarner

When I get back to my desk I'll check out their numbers. From what I can see, 12seconds isn't setting the world on fire. But maybe I'm missing their full story.

Regardless, what we're seeing here is the way a smart entrepreneur moves. Don't you agree? If we don't see growth, we need to adjust.

Andrew Warner(sent from my mobile)

http://www.centernetworks.com centernetworks

thanks for the link andrew! good job on the transcription

robblatt

What I see is someone who has sold companies in the past before they needed to be successful and this time around, no one was buying. Rather than start a new company, he changed the one that he was working with at the moment. The site was built under the business model of “someone will buy it” and that was clear from the beginning. How do you make money on video conversations? You don't. Someone else buys it and makes sense of it.

Also, check the numbers for 12Seconds on CrunchBase. They don't need to set the world on fire. They have no VCs to answer to. What they've done is double their traffic in a year. That's not what I call flat growth. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/12seconds